Kings of Broken Things
Theodore Wheeler
Prologue
To the boys who lived on Clandish Street, those who were too young to fight in the war on either side, the world was smaller than the newspapers suggested. Maybe they’d heard the names of generals like Foch or Hindenburg or Pershing, but these names had no bearing on their lives. They worried about the names of ballplayers and boxers instead. These were boys whose only shoes were baseball spikes. Who carried a mitt everywhere, just in case. Who stole packs of Sweet Caporal cigarettes to acquire the Ty Cobb card inside, then smoked the cigarettes too, because why not? Life was simple for them, for a while. Pleasant noises came from the homes on their block. A hausfrau singing in Plattdeutsch loud enough to hear from the walkway, the woman proud of how she slipped through her aspirated syllables and spit her t’s. Sweethearts, arm in arm, struggled to find privacy as clans of siblings escaped their houses before the sun set. Dogs let their tongues wag in the heat, bellies bulging in the dirt, full of table scraps, chicken guts, and pork rib bones.
People watched each other from porches after dinner, their attention caught in particular that summer by a girl with a space around her on the walkway because nobody wanted to come close. Oh? Didn’t you hear? The girl slender and dignified. She clutched her man’s elbow. That’s Doreen, yeah? No, that’s Carla. No, that’s Evelyn. No. That’s that girl Agnes.
She was a pretty girl, with blond hair and an erect way in her back, prettier than most. This girl walking down the street, her man’s arm around her waist. Don’t you see her? She was raped last week.
It was remarkable to the boys to see a woman who’d had it done to her like that. A girl shuffling along with her wrists bruised purplish, her skin thin at the bruises, like a rotten tomato under the plant where the good tomatoes grew. A girl who wore elegant dresses. Who put curls in her long, fair hair.
Everybody had a theory about how these things happened, especially later, when the mob caught one, a black man who did bad things to a girl. They would wonder about it in Omaha for years after the fact. What went through his mind? What was he thinking when the cops handed him over? This one they caught, this Will Brown. They’d wonder if his ears worked, if he was able to hear what that mob promised to do to him. They’d never know. No more than fifty people had even heard of him the day he was arrested, but the day after, Will Brown’s name was on the lips of every person in Omaha, after what that girl said he did to her.
The boys who grew up on Clandish would think an awful lot about the folks who were around those years, the war years, the Red Summer that came after the war. This was the neighborhood they’d claimed, and it would go up in flames. They would be the ones to set it on fire.
THE OPEN CITY
Spring 1917
Consider Karel Miihlstein. In 1917 he was eleven years old, new to Omaha, fresh off the boat when he met the boys in the school yard. He was from Salzburg, he said, but had come from Galizien, over there, where the Eastern Front of the war was being fought. His father repaired musical instruments; his mother had been a famous actress and singer, out in the far reaches of the empire his family fled from. But his mother was dead by then—she’d died back there—and maybe this was why his family had to run from Europe in such a hurry like they did. And, of course, there was the war.
Karel was an interesting kid. He had talents. His English came off as well as his German. He could run. He was bigger than most boys his age and knew a little violin when pressed to play. But these were inessential skills. That spring Karel got to know the boys on Clandish, so he learned how important it was here to be good at baseball.
Once the weather turned warm, the boys divvied into teams. They were the oldest in their school, eleven, twelve, thirteen—at the end of boyhood.
Karel wasn’t the last one picked that year, even though he didn’t have a clue how to play. There were two others who were known to be horrible at baseball, for reasons that couldn’t be helped—one whose rickety legs were being straightened by iron braces and another whose hair was kept shorn to eradicate the bugs that plagued him. So Karel grinned when the captains from one team grabbed his arm and pulled him to their side before it came down to the final pick. Alfred Braun and Jimmy Mac, boys from his class, were the two who picked him. It wasn’t until then that they asked if he even played.
“I never held a baseball before,” Karel admitted.
“You kidding?”
“Can you throw?”
It was no use lying. Once they fetched a ball and Karel sort of flipped it sidearm to Alfred, sort of rolled the ball in the school yard gravel, they saw all they needed to see.
Jimmy Mac slapped his hands to his face. “Oh, Jesus. Why did you send us this one?”
Karel didn’t know what to do. He pulled his arms into himself, felt his shoulders shrink as panic crept over him.
“Hold on now,” Alfred said. “That’s bad, but you’re not the worst I seen. Not for a first throw. We’re just going to have to fix you, yeah.”
“Sure. Don’t worry.” Jimmy Mac dropped his hands to his side and smiled. “We won’t let you down.”
Workup was played in the school yard that first week of spring. A real game wouldn’t form until the next week, when the captains could be sure where each belonged on the diamond. For the initial days a boy took his shot at every position in turn. They rutted out base paths with the end of a bat, folded felt jackets into squares for first, second, third. Home plate was a cap. The school owned a bat—a stubby red thing with a hook screwed into the handle so it could be hung from a coatrack. The boys could borrow the bat whenever they wanted, so long as they put it back where it belonged. A couple of boys had ball gloves but most didn’t. A boy should get used to cradling a ground ball soft with his hands or to knocking it down with his chest, or if he was chicken, to turning and giving chase as the ball rolled by. A glove wasn’t all that important, not how the boys saw it. The hands were important.